Throughout the years, new features in refrigerators demand cooling, such as ice makers and water chillers have been incorporated into household refrigerators. As these features have evolved in terms of location, size, capacity and efficiency, new ways of providing refrigeration must be developed. Recently, much effort has been spent on cooling these features with cold air stream-based solutions. However, cold air stream-based solutions typically do not provide enough cooling capacity to refrigerator features, whether within the refrigerator or on the door, thus limiting their capacity and performance. Therefore, a need has been identified in the art to provide a secondary cooling loop for cooling features such as ice maker, water chiller, and/or other compartment within the refrigerator on the door.
There also have been considerable efforts recently to maximize the storage space in the fresh food and freezer compartments of a refrigerator. Some of these efforts focus on changing the size and position of the ice maker, either located in the freezer or fresh food compartment, but have limited ice production rates. Therefore, a need has been identified in the art to provide the consumer with the option of adding/removing different size and capacity module ice makers or other features, such as a water chiller, chilled compartment, or the like.
The present invention addresses these needs and other needs in the art to provide secondary cooling within the refrigerator or on the door of the refrigerator.